Zubov, a little wealthier from his night’s poker winnings, shuffled off to his bunk to get some sleep.
Alone on the afterdeck, Garner tilted his head back and stretched, gazing appreciatively at the weak sunrise. Below his feet, he felt the Lansing's powerful engines gently vibrating the deck as the ship plowed toward the next sampling station. Such moments were too precious not to enjoy, if only temporarily.
Clark poked his head out of the aft lab.
“Garner call for you on the bridge.”
Garner followed the winch operator forward and made his way to the bridge, a twinge of concern building in his gut. Who would be calling him out here? Most of those who knew where he was wouldn’t know how to reach him on the Lansing.
Indeed, the ability to be out of touch with the civilized world and its cellular phones, fax machines, pagers, and electronic mail was a side effect of Garner’s career choice that he considered a professional perk.
The radio operator said the caller was a Dr. Carol Harmon.
“Where are you?” Garner asked, a trace of a smile coming to his lips.
Knowing his ex-wife’s affinity for adventurous locales, she could literally be anywhere.
Carol gave him the specifics of their recent acoustic survey and how the Balaenoptera south of Baffin Island had waylaid them.
“More importantly,” Carol’s voice came back over the static-laden connection, “where are you?”
Garner recounted the events of the past few days. Although Medusa was working marvelously, he and Zubov would be hardpressed to get all their sampling done within the next week, even if the weather held up, which seemed unlikely. To fail in that, as it now appeared they might, would cost them the entire season and add at least another year to his data collection effort.
Their get-acquainted chatter had taken less than a minute, but Garner could already detect a nervous edge in Carol’s voice. This wasn’t just a social call.
“What’s up, Doc?” he asked. “It sounds like you’re up to your neck in more than just whales.”
Carol hesitated before replying, uncertain how to begin or continue.
“It’s not just the ice that’s got them,” she finally said. “I think there’s something in the water up here.”
Something in the water. The purposefully nondescript statement suggested something more foreboding than vague. The last time Carol and Garner had discovered “something in the water,” in the Pacific Northwest, a devastatingly lethal biological menace was already on the rampage.
Carol detailed their last two days on the ice with the whales, the dive taken by Dexter and Ramsey, and the terrifying symptoms that seemed to come from nowhere.
“When Susan called it radiation poisoning, I thought she was nuts,” Carol added, still incredulous at what the crew of the Phoenix had seen. “Then we got out a dosimeter the only one we have, of course and the samples confirmed it: the whales are cooked, the water is cooked, and for all I know, we’re cooked.”
“Cooked with what?” Garner pressed.
“As a guess.” He knew Carol’s guesses were better than most thorough analyses.
The background radiation levels Carol relayed to him were incredible easily a hundred times higher than anything occurring naturally in the environment. What mattered as much as the level or duration of exposure was the exact kinds of radionuclides nuclear fission products they had found.
“Enriched uranium,” she replied. “At least, too much U-235 to be natural. Strontium, maybe. Cesium. Beryllium. A whole cocktail of minor elements, but of course it’s the long-lived bastards that caught my attention.”
“What about plutonium? Radium?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Have you dredged any of the sediment for higher levels?”
“Not yet. We’ve got one dosimeter and it doesn’t come with a recipe book for the stew we’re finding up here.”
“All right,” Garner soothed her. “Back up. How can you be certain it’s a local source of contamination?” Whales and other arctic mammals, by virtue of their size and position at the top of the food chain, were known to accumulate toxins, chemicals, and other pollutants in their tissues.
Blue whales, traveling the world in their migration, had a tremendous opportunity to accrue things like long half-life radionuclides.
“As near as we can guess, this pod has been frozen in the ice for at least a week. But if the radioactivity in their flesh is accrued, it’s a hundred a thousand times more concentrated than anything I’ve ever heard of.” She listed the various governmental bodies she had contacted so far and the thoroughly blind-ended suggestions each had given her.
“Even the nuclear regulatory agencies refuse to consider this as a potential military or industrial radiation source,” she finished.
“And natural radiation sources aren’t under anyone’s formal jurisdiction,” Garner added. “A hot potato, literally.”
“What we’ve found can’t be natural,” Carol said. Garner could envision the set of her jaw, hands on her hips. Determination wasn’t lacking in his ex-wife, something he had admired and at times resented during the directionless days of his early career.
“And if it isn’t natural, then…”
“Then you’ve got a big problem,” Garner said.
“My biggest problem is that you’re in the wrong bloody ocean,” Carol said. She knew Garner already knew the reason for her call, and that the result of it would have an immediate effect on his own research.
For as much as she had struggled with those reservations, she had made the call nonetheless.
“I need you,” she finally said, and with that admission the rest of her words followed in a rush. “I need you to come up here and help us figure out what’s going on.”
“If what you’ve just told me is correct, I’d have to agree,” Garner said.
“I knew you would. I’m sorry. I should’ve taken a hint when I found out you couldn’t possibly be any farther away from me and still be on the same planet. But once spring sets in, the melting ice could make any kind of contamination a lot worse. This floe is going to break up in a few days. If there’s any chance of us identifying and containing the problem, we need you, we need Sergei, and we need Medusa up here. The sooner the better.”
Garner didn’t dispute the urgency of the request. He knew that Carol would have considered every plausible theory and official avenue before raising the alarm; if she was calling him, she had exhausted all more straightforward channels.
Never mind that he needed at least another week in the Weddell Sea to get all the data he’d hoped to get. Never mind that the Lansing wasn’t due back in the States until the end of the month. Never mind any of it. Carol needed him.
Garner relayed the Lansing’s present position.
“What can the Nolan Group do to help us out?” he asked.
“How long will it take you to get to the Falkland Islands? I can have a Nolan jet waiting for you at Stanley. You can fly up, transfer to a helicopter at Cape Dorset or Hall Beach, and be here by the weekend.”
She made it sound like a junket to Cape Cod.
Garner was less optimistic as he worked out the itinerary in his mind.
“I guess it depends,” he said.
“On what?”
“On what the in-flight movie will be.”
Relief rushed into Carol’s voice.
“Anything you want. Everything you want; it’ll be a two-day trip.” She paused again, overwhelmed by gratitude. “Thank you, Brock. Thank you so much.”